Exactly. Quality isn't defined by the final product, it's defined by how much work you did to get there. Which is of course why I refuse to use a keyboard and do all my data entry by manually triggering a sequence of bits to the serial port of my computer (which is itself built from boards with hand-etched tracings, which I created using a knife I forged myself in a furnace powered only by my sense of righteousness). Anything less would lead to low-quality text, that while indistinguishable from high-quality text, required much less work to create and therefore is not "pure" enough for my standards.

If you want to have a "waiting for good lighting conditions contest" go ahead. I'm sure there are some people who love the idea. But you don't get to redefine "photography".

The big problem comes down to the rules and to what extent the person who set the rules is aware, not just of what can be done today digitally, but what could be done a decade or two ago with film.

My late father was an active participant in his local color slide club, Some competitors entered spectacular pictures they got by "sandwiching" slides -- that is, if they had one with a great silhouette of a tree, and another with a great sunset, putting both in a single slide mount so they got a tree silhouetted in front of a sunset. That's easy to do in Photoshop, of course -- but, while it was permitted in film (though I agree with my father; it shouldn't have been) it would never be allowed today if done digitally.

If you limit someone to "just what the camera saw" you're not limiting them to what could have been done with film; you're limiting them to a lot less than could have been, and routinely was, done. As has been pointed out up-thread, the genius of Ansel Adams was not just in pointing a camera in the right direction at the right time, but in the work he did in the darkroom. That's why one photo is a spectacular piece and another is a vacation snapshot.

But where do you draw the line?

Is cropping legal? Never mind a darkroom, you can do that with a pair of scissors! In fact, you can still do it with a pair of scissors; print your picture out at a larger size and physically cut it to the size required for the contest. No digital manipulation at all, not even any chemical manipulation, but the picture has been changed.

How about adjusting the exposure? Make it a bit lighter, a bit darker, etc? Not only a common darkroom technique, but one so common that it would be considered irresponsible and/or sloppy work not to do it during development. So how about digitally?

What about ... well, I can go through the gamut of Photoshop tools and list film analogs for many of them. As has also been pointed out up-thread, that's where they came from. Sharpening an image, for instance, would seem to be over the line ... but "unsharp mask" (a powerful image-sharpening filter) is a digital implementation of a film process.

This isn't a new problem. My father was annoyed about people physically enhancing photos in the 1970s (the sandwiches). They also cropped them with black tape, they sandwiched them with gradients, they did all kinds of things. And this was just slides, where you're looking at the original film.

Photographers have been manipulating images pretty much since the process of printing was developed. The minute you move beyond a glass-plate camera to one that requires some intermediate step, whether it is simply projection like those slides or more complicated prints like the works of Ansel Adams, something is being changed along the way as an inherent part of the process. How long do you leave the print in the developer tray? That can make a huge difference, and it's an integral part of darkroom work; you have to pick some time, and whatever that time is affects the final result.

Another example: I have a DLSR and an iPod Touch. The pictures I take with that DSLR are going to be better, technically, than pictures I take at the same time in the same place with the iPod. All else aside, it's better glass. Do we want to judge equipment? Am I a better photographer, more worthy of a prize, because I'm carrying one camera instead of the other?

People who don't know much about photography say "no Photoshopping" because they think that will produce the "pure" prints of the film era. They don't realize that those prints were never "pure"; there was always some type of manipulation, some artistic decisions (even "how long do I develop this?) involved.

The other problem is that there is no good answer, or at least no one answer. I think most of us can agree that cropping should be allowed, and everyone except the people who used to do it with film can agree that adding or removing elements from an image should not be allowed. But what about things like adjusting the exposure? Tweaking contrast? Removing red-eye? (I was printing out some small signs for a client last week, and the Kodak print kiosk kept trying to get me to let it remove some imagined red-eye ... from close-ups of flowers) Adjusting color channels? Sharpening the whole picture? Sharpening part of the picture? Blurring part of the picture? In between cropping (you can do it with scissors) and adding, removing, or replacing elements (that sunset never happened in that place) there's an enormous gray area.

The only answer, I think, is for the people setting contest rules to be photographers themselves, and be fully aware of the types of both physical and digital image manipulation so they can determine what they do and do not want to allow. They have to pick a spot and draw that line, and in order to do so they need to thoroughly understand the continuum the line is being drawn on.

By the way, my personal rule of thumb for what I consider acceptable in my own photographs (non-competitive) is that anything which affects the whole image -- as someone said, basically somethingI can do with the RAW file -- is okay, but modifying only a part of the image takes it from photography to artwork. That said, I do occasionally do the digital equivalent of airbrushing ..."hey, there are some white specks on the black blanket the kitten is sitting on, I'd better fix that" ... but for a picture I'd send to my mother-in-law, not a picture I'd enter in a contest. I still haven't made up my mind about exposure gradients (I suppose I could just buy a neutral gradient filter and screw that onto my lens, and avoid the whole problem!) but they feel "wrong" to me.

So, really, the rules have to be spelled out. They can't be "not too much Photoshopping" but, rather, how much and of what elements is acceptable. And unless someone knows photography well, they're going to have a very hard time there.

The guy who took this picture had his own system of developing film to get the tonal structure he wanted and then heavily manipulating light when he printed the photos, and he did pretty well as a photographer...both financially and with the critics besides. Maybe you've heard of him...Ansel Adams.

AverageAmericanGuy:Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich: AverageAmericanGuy: No photoshopping should be acceptable in a photography contest.

Photographers have been shopping their images since film was invented. A darkroom gives you a great deal of control over brightness and contrast, tone, etc. You can crop, and you can even control specific portions of the photograph without affecting other areas. It's seems silly that it's against the rule to do with a computer what film photographers do by waving little paddles around.

I'm against those things as well.

To be fair, I'm only against these things in the milieu of photography contests.

Where one person spends a month of their lives staked out to capture the perfect shot with the sun in the right place in the sky and the weather just so, another will take a mediocre base image and dodge and burn until what he's looking for 'pops'. It's a disservice to those who work hard for their pure shots.

There is clearly an acceptable level, as even your digital camera is "photoshoping" what it saves to produce a better photo (Unless your using a raw format). Most people would say that adjusting levels/colors across the whole image is also acceptable manipulation. Once you begin using tools to alter specific portions of the image, it becomes totally a matter of opinion on how much is acceptable. Without seeing a before and after picture, you can't really judge whether what was done is acceptable, and the article didn't have one.

MorePeasPlease:How about the requirement that the original, unaltered photograph be displayed side-by-side with the final submission?

But there's the rub.

What is the "original, unaltered photograph"?

For example, I have a Canon T3i DSLR. It's set to save both RAW and JPEG files for each picture. Which one would you call the "original"? They're both produced simultaneously by the same camera, but they can look totally different. And if I set the white balance, color curve, etc., to match my memory of the scene when I open the RAW, that will be something else again.

And what about someone whose camera doesn't save RAW files at all? Pretty much any camera less fancy than that T3i (it's a low-end DSLR) only saves JPEGs. They will all have been extensively modified, not by the person taking the picture, but by the person who set the values in the algorithms that process the picture when saving it as a JPEG. Those pictures probably undergo more extensive adjustment and correction than what I do to a picture in Photoshop ... but are they more "pure" in some way because some photographer (or some programmer) at the manufacturer's HQ picked what changes to make, rather than the photographer on the scene?

A major problem, I think, is that there are people who believe there was some utopian past where photographers chose what picture to take, and all of their artistry was in picking that scene; nothing else mattered. In reality, that time never existed. The art of photography has always been at least as much about the editing and processing -- the "post-production" -- as it has been about the choice of image. It fools us because a photo looks like a frozen moment of reality, but it isn't. In fact, a photo is more like a painting than most people realize. The difference between a vacation snapshot and a picture of the same area on a postcard or in National Geographic isn't that the professional photographer was magically able to shoot the perfect picture. No, it's in what he did with the picture (or pictures) he took.

Also, in regard to the comment about taking multiple pictures of the same scene: How do you think the pros have always done it? When you look at, say, the photos that accompany a story in National Geographic, since I just mentioned that, do you believe that the photographer took those pictures exactly as printed and only those pictures? One of the advantages that the pros always had was expense accounts. That professional photographer might have gone through a whole roll of film taking shots of one tree -- different exposures, different angles, etc. Then he picked the best ... or decided, when he got them back, that none of those would really work after all. The amateur couldn't afford to do that. Film was expensive. Processing was expensive. If you were the average photographer, you got one chance. Now ... well, we've all got endless film! I can put the equivalent of ten rolls of 26-exposure film on a single chip for my DSLR, and I carry a couple of spare chips (I'm actually more worried about battery life -- despite a spare battery, too -- than storage). Like the pros of old, I can now afford to take as many shots of a subject as I need to be sure I can get it at its best.

I like the idea of requiring the RAW file to be submitted along with the competition picture (though that could be an issue for lower-end contests where people have cameras that only give them JPEGs). That way the judges can look at it and see for themselves if that sunset was really there, or that man was standing where he seems to be.

What I'm seeing here that's very interesting is the split between the people who think there is (or ever has been) such a thing as a "real" picture and think it's possible to limit contest photography to that point, and people who recognize that there hasn't -- even glass plates still had to be developed -- and are divided on exactly where the line should be drawn. I strongly suspect that the people with more experience with photography, especially film photography, are in the latter group.

Back in the day, a friend of my father's bought a fancy camera setup and went to great effort to get good pictures. My father's pictures, even of the same scene, always came out better. Why? Because my dad sent his film off to Kodak to be developed, and his friend got his developed at the drugstore. It's never been about just what the camera sees. "Post-production" -- the choice of developing lab, in that case, and everything from the skill of the developer to whether they'd changed their chemicals within living memory -- has always made a difference.

In short, that mythical "pure" era of "real" photography is just that: a myth. It never happened. Two men taking pictures of the exact same scene, with very similar cameras, on the same brand of film, still got very different results because of how the pictures were developed. And this was slides, not even prints. (for the newbies among us, slides were developed film -- positives instead of negatives -- mounted in little frames and projected on a screen, usually to torment friends who forced themselves to smile and nod at one's vacation pictures)

In a class in high school, we made pinhole cameras. You can't get much simpler. An oatmeal box, a piece of aluminum foil (to make a good, crisp pinhole), some tape, and a piece of print paper, plus a multi-hour exposure. There is nothing, not even a lens, between the scene and the print. But still, when you put that paper in the developing solution, you had choices. How long would you leave it in for, at the very least. Changing that -- even with nothing else -- changed the print. Changed the picture. Changed, not what the camera saw, but how the photographer represented it to the viewer.

The issue is not whether image manipulation should be allowed -- some amount of it, even with the most primitive camera, is inevitable; it's an inherent part of the photographic process. It can't be excluded. The question is how much, and of which types, should be allowed.

There's also the matter of equipment. Take my DSLR and my iPod Touch: I can shoot RAW with the DSLR, but I don't have that level of control over the iPod's camera. It does its thing -- "enhancing" the image in whatever way its little silicon brain sees fit, which mostly seems to involve obsessively trying to focus on things I don't want it to focus on -- with no input from me. I like to think I can make better choices in that regard than the algorithms that manipulate the iPod's images but, all other things being equal, it can certainly get a better photo than an untouched RAW from the DSLR. It's doing a lot of the things I would do to that RAW (normalizing the contrast, for instance) automatically. Where does that fall on the manipulation spectrum? The iPod's photos are heavily manipulated, but not by me. While this isn't an issue for the sort of competition the article is about, that kind is a small minority compared to the contests run by local businesses and groups, most of which are open to anybody, whether they have a professional camera or a cell phone. It would seem silly to give preference to the people with the cell phone cameras or the point-and-shoot cameras because their cameras do all the image manipulation behind the scenes, while the guy with the DSLR has to do it himself.

"Only allow real pictures" isn't the answer ... not least because there never have been "real" pictures in that sense. Even directs positives -- slides, glass plates, pinhole photos -- still have to be developed, with all the opportunities for changing the result that exist. Again, remember my father and the guy with a similar camera but a bad choice of developing labs. And with prints, the opportunities multiply.

The trick is to allow digital equivalents of darkroom techniques while prohibiting digital equivalents of airbrushing.

Or, of course, to issue all participants sealed cameras, identical in all ways. That way the contest organizers would have total control over "developing" and "printing". No changes, not even cropping, could be done by the photographer. Auto-enhancement features of the camera would be prohibited as well (if the image data says they were used, the photographer is disqualified). That's still not exactly "pure" but at least everyone would be working under the exact same conditions.

What once was an art can now be duplicated by an idiot with a cell phone.

Not quite. A small-sensor cellphone camera can only do so much, no matter what you do in post. Plus, it's mostly the photographer that makes the photo. If someone doesn't have an eye for it, it doesn't matter what bells & whistles are employed after the fact. Garbage in, garbage out.

Digital has made photography much more accessible, and I consider that a very good thing.

in my personal view, as long as you are not editing out, or adding in content, its ok. 50% of photography is what you shoot, and 50% how you process the image. Its been that was since Ansel Adams.

You can take a large-format camera, and go set up where Adams set up, wait for the exact same time if day and weather conditions, and the output image will likely not be as good as his, because of the magic he worked in the darkroom. darkroom = photoshop.

AverageAmericanGuy:Where one person spends a month of their lives staked out to capture the perfect shot with the sun in the right place in the sky and the weather just so, another will take a mediocre base image and dodge and burn until what he's looking for 'pops'. It's a disservice to those who work hard for their pure shots.

i'ld say give a good printer your hard wrought pure image and he/she would make it even better.

Photographers have been shopping their images since film was invented. A darkroom gives you a great deal of control over brightness and contrast, tone, etc. You can crop, and you can even control specific portions of the photograph without affecting other areas. It's seems silly that it's against the rule to do with a computer what film photographers do by waving little paddles around.

Pretty much this. I used to add shadows to things in the dark room, and that was in highschool. I even used diffrent filters on the enlarger to adjust the image, dodged and burned specific areas, stitched negitives together, preformed double exposures to produce neat effects, tons of stuff. It was a bit harder then the computer is, But you could accomplish alot with a good enlarger and some time.

Photographers have been shopping their images since film was invented. A darkroom gives you a great deal of control over brightness and contrast, tone, etc. You can crop, and you can even control specific portions of the photograph without affecting other areas. It's seems silly that it's against the rule to do with a computer what film photographers do by waving little paddles around.

AverageAmericanGuy:Yes, and in a photography contest, I think the use of photograph manipulation is out of place.

Photography refers to both the actions of making an image and the "printing" it for display.

Printing used to be just that. Going into a darkroom and using various tools and techniques to create the finished print. Great photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and many others took as much pride in their darkroom skills as they did their ability to capture images. The digital darkroom is just a much a part of the creative process as the physical darkroom was.

It's ridiculous to think that for photo contests, people should just print the straight image from the camera. Most of the time an image doesn't actually reflect the scene that was shot. Contrast issues, colors look different, etc. It's prefectly acceptable for someone to work with an image so that it looks like what scene looked like.

Psycoholic_Slag:My Cannon 35mm camera has been sitting idle for a long time. I started losing interest in photography when the digital world took it over. What once was an art can now be duplicated by an idiot with a cell phone.

"A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said 'I love your pictures - they're wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.'

He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove."

pciszek:Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich: A darkroom gives you a great deal of control over brightness and contrast, tone, etc.

Was there ever a way to increase as opposed to decrease contrast in a darkroom?

One can increase contrast in the darkroom a multiple of ways. Develop film longer, use an intensifier on the negative, preflash photo paper, use a higher contrast print developer, use ferri bleach on the print, use selenium toner...

He did a hell of a lot more than adjust the levels and crop the image.

He digitally created shadows that could not exist.He cloned-out a number of inconvenient features in the frame.He adjusted exposure levels at radically different rates in different parts of an image.

I think we all agree that cropping and playing with curves is fine, but this is a contest to determine who took the best picture - not who can do the best post-production work. I also think the runner-up's picture of the projects in Glasgow kind of sucked and should not have won. It looks like it was pulled out of someone's vacation photos.

I've been a photographer for 40 years. In film days, the rule was, if it is in the negative, and you can draw it out by dodging and burning the image, it's legit. Ask Ansel Adams. If you are adding crap, it isn't

RAW is the equivilent of a negative. If the camera captured those dark clouds and such, and you can draw them out in the digital darkroom, it should count.

I shoot lots of architecture, and a compress the dynamic range so that, in most cases, you can see the inside and outside of the home at the same time. I don't consider it "photoshopping".

orbister Will photography be defined by "darkroom processes" in ten years? fifty? a hundred? Should film users today be restricted to the manipulations possible in the daguerreotype process?

Exactly.

I don't do contests, because I feel they're crap. Imposing rules on what is "good" or "bad" only limits art. What matters is that the person looking at it (in the case of art or photography) or listening to it (music) gets something out of it.

Sometimes I don't do anything to the photos I shoot. Sometimes I shop the Hell out of them. I have an idea of what I want something to look like before I shoot it. Granted, II try to get it as close to that idea right out of the camera as possible, but if it needs shopping, I won't hesitate to do it 'til it looks like I want it to.

I don't do photography to please some uppity purist judge with a stick up his ass. I do it for me, and for the people who wind up looking at it.

orbister:Waldo Pepper: orbister: Mock26: If what you did could be duplicated in a dark room then it should be allowed. Anything beyond that should not be allowed.

For how long should photographic skills be limited by the possibilities of a chemical process which has already been obsolete for ten years or more? In fifty years time there will be hardly any photographers around who have ever used film or paper.

it is not longer photography and becomes more of an illustration or painting once you go beyond the normal "darkroom" processes.

You miss my point. Will photography be defined by "darkroom processes" in ten years? fifty? a hundred? Should film users today be restricted to the manipulations possible in the daguerreotype process?

And to extend this idea of "darkroom processes" a bit. HDR photography is pretty much a digital application of using the zone system. Unsharp masking is a darkroom process. Perspective correction can be done in camera, or in darkroom. Analog photography is currently inhabiting roughly the same space in art as printmaking right now. Photography simply means "writing with light". To try and define what constitutes an unmanipulated image is very blurry. As there is really no such thing.

When you get in to adding elements, taking away elements (I'd allow dust spot removal, personally), creating something that you didn't see and photograph - that's digital art. Levels and light adjustment, sure. A camera still can't take what we can see for a photo and those adjustments are often needed to make it how we saw it.

I was disappointed to read in a major photography magazine about a photographer that added mist to flamingos in a swamp to add drama. That's not a photo, he didn't see it. He created it.

The other example was birds flying between two trees with the sun as the backdrop. He said he took a picture of the trees and sun, looked down at his bag for something, looked up, saw the birds to the right of the tree and took the photo. He later moved the birds to between the trees. His reasoning was that it had happened he just missed the photo. Assuming the birds did fly through the middle he still missed the photo - too bad. It's still digital art.

I don't enter contests because I'm not good with photoshop and I don't want to be.

Tired of wondering if a photo is a photo or if it's digital art - it does a disservice to the great photographers.

I'm afraid I have no "pure" horsecrap. As soon as it becomes available I mix it with grass clippings (from the lawn that I cut by hand, one blade at a time, using flint blades rendered from Chert nodules in the limestone deposition I've laying, grain-by-grain) and bake it into bricks.

Back in the days of film all those darkroom tricks were not allowed in most comps either, there were, and are, special comp categories for manips.

I take part in a super-amateur online series where the winner of each one sets the next subject and rules. Most people say no shopping beyond the usual post-proc. When I win I usually set a 'free' rule for my subjects for a change of pace.

The only important thing is that everyone involved is clear what the rules are and are playing to the same set, and judges know what they are judging. In this case that was not the way of it.

profplump:AverageAmericanGuy: It's a disservice to those who work hard for their pure shots.

Exactly. Quality isn't defined by the final product, it's defined by how much work you did to get there. Which is of course why I refuse to use a keyboard and do all my data entry by manually triggering a sequence of bits to the serial port of my computer (which is itself built from boards with hand-etched tracings, which I created using a knife I forged myself in a furnace powered only by my sense of righteousness). Anything less would lead to low-quality text, that while indistinguishable from high-quality text, required much less work to create and therefore is not "pure" enough for my standards.

If you want to have a "waiting for good lighting conditions contest" go ahead. I'm sure there are some people who love the idea. But you don't get to redefine "photography".

Mock26:If what you did could be duplicated in a dark room then it should be allowed. Anything beyond that should not be allowed.

For how long should photographic skills be limited by the possibilities of a chemical process which has already been obsolete for ten years or more? In fifty years time there will be hardly any photographers around who have ever used film or paper.

AverageAmericanGuy:AverageAmericanGuy: Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich: AverageAmericanGuy: No photoshopping should be acceptable in a photography contest.

Photographers have been shopping their images since film was invented. A darkroom gives you a great deal of control over brightness and contrast, tone, etc. You can crop, and you can even control specific portions of the photograph without affecting other areas. It's seems silly that it's against the rule to do with a computer what film photographers do by waving little paddles around.

I'm against those things as well.

To be fair, I'm only against these things in the milieu of photography contests.

Where one person spends a month of their lives staked out to capture the perfect shot with the sun in the right place in the sky and the weather just so, another will take a mediocre base image and dodge and burn until what he's looking for 'pops'. It's a disservice to those who work hard for their pure shots.

I have to agree with the Dodge/Burn in a contest, but exposure adjustment, levels and such I think are just fine. Basically, anything done in Adobe CameraRAW is fine, since you are basically just digitally choosing your development mixture. Once you've imported the photo into Photoshop, however, add your watermark and you are done. No filters, no layers (other than a watermark).

wildcardjack:I think that adjusting levels might be okay, but any movement of elements of the image would be well into PS territory. I've been told that a big part of the genius of Ansel Adams was the result of tweaks in the development process.

Exactly. If it's a direct analog of a darkroom process, it's OK to do it in Photoshop. (IMHO)

I think that adjusting levels might be okay, but any movement of elements of the image would be well into PS territory. I've been told that a big part of the genius of Ansel Adams was the result of tweaks in the development process.